By TVN Staff | May 13, 2021 | 10:11 a.m. ET.
Pennsylvania’s Senate Video Facility provides citizens with government transparency through gavel-to-gavel television coverage of Senate sessions plus select committee meetings and public hearings. Wanting to enhance accessibility for hard-of-hearing individuals, the Senate chose the enCaption system from ENCO to provide automated closed captioning for its TV operations. enCaption has also enabled the Senate to provide in-room open captions for hard-of-hearing meeting participants on an as-needed basis.
The Senate’s initial closed captioning efforts many years ago pulled data from the court reporter’s transcription system, but the technology was not sufficiently mature and the results were unreliable. The closed captioning initiative came back to the forefront years later, with both the majority and minority leaders wanting to make the sessions more accessible to constituents.